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How Munich switched 15,000 PCs from Windows to Linux

382 points by mksaunders 12y ago

usablebytes 12y ago
The whole story is enjoyable; especially the Ballmer Visit part. It's surprising to see the city council reacting that way to his visit. Something that is hard to understand in many parts of the world.
- Vespasian 12y ago
  Maybe Ballmer was overkill in this situation. While I could see a local (German or even Bavarian since their German Headquarter is just out of Munich) manager with connections to members of the council being able to influence their decision, an American coming over and basically demanding from them to change their mind is probably the best way to enforce the idea even more. The article mentions that the mayor had difficulties communicating in English good enough to feel comfortable. Add to that the slight dislike of American culture common with many people here, the high degree of local identification in southern germany and you get that result. That said, there CEO flying over was probably the last straw they reverted to when everything else had failed ;)
sdfjkl 12y ago
The most surprising thing about all this is that a city council needed 15'000 PCs in the first place, implying a roughly equal number of users.
- sgift 12y ago
  15.000 for the administration of Munich, a city with nearly 1.4 million inhabitants. I don't see anything surprising here?
  - sdfjkl 12y ago
    1 employee per 93 citizens? I don't have anything to compare it to, but it seems high.
    - oblio 12y ago
      "From June 30, 2002 through June 30, 2013, city staffing decreased by 9,028 positions and totaled 295,894 by the end of fiscal year 2013, a 3.0 percent decline." http://ibo.nyc.ny.us/cgi-park2/?p=590 http://ibo.nyc.ny.us/cgi-park2/?p=590 Apparently you need a lot of people to keep a city running.
      - xyzzy123 12y ago
        This includes firefighters, police, education, and probably things like sanitation. I wonder if the Munich figures include these staff.
        arrrg 12y ago
        For the most part, yes. Here’s a list (German): http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtverwaltung_München http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtverwaltung_München Police are employed by the state (Bavaria in Munich) in Germany, but the rest should be included. Teachers and all kinds of other child care workers definitely are. If it isn’t done by the church child care is usually organised by the city. Public schools are the norm (only about six percent of students in Germany go to private schools). Munich has 4500 full time teachers for 72000 students. Municipal utilities, public transport and the hospital were all privatised in the 90s, so those aren’t included (about 20,000 employees). Really, to compare the numbers you have to go through them item by item. However, Munich’s number doesn’t seem high compared to US numbers for local government.
    - mrweasel 12y ago
      Not if you're European. I don't have the numbers for Germany, but here in Denmark somewhere between 30 to 40% of the workforce are employed by the government ( city/country/state ).
    - kiiski 12y ago
      I live in a small city of 75000 people (in Finland), where the city has ~4400 employees.
    - pistle 12y ago
  - xyzzy123 12y ago
    93 * 0.66 * 0.75 = 1 in 45 workers work for the city council (and need a desktop!). That does seem like a lot to me, I wonder if the council administers some larger area than just the city? Based on an age-dependency ratio of 50 for Germany[1] as a whole and employment to population ratio[2] of 75%. [1] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/age-dependency-ratio-percent-of-working-age-population-wb-data.html http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/age-dependency-ratio... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment-to-population_ratio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment-to-population_ratio EDIT: Fixed math with age/dependency ratio...
dewey 12y ago
Interesting, just yesterday I visited the "Landeskriminalamt" (State Office of Criminal Investigations) in Munich and they are just migrating all of their Windows XP desktops (They were criticized after paying a lot of money to keep getting security updates from Microsoft) to Windows 8.1. They mentioned that they are paying a lot of licence fees every year and that making sure everything is licenced correctly is a big task in itself. We asked them why they are not switching to open source software and Linux for their desktops and they basically said it's too big of a switch and even the city of Munich is struggling to migrate all their computers and that they are even thinking about switching back to Windows. This doesn't really seem that accurate after reading that article. Edit: Another anecdote from the visit: They said that even the switch from XP to 8.1 will confuse a lot of users (The guy giving the talk said that their average employee is already confused if some icons on the desktop change and they are very reluctant to accept changes). They printed flyers and recorded elearning courses on how to open a program or use the new system. They also added a simple way to migrate to some kind of legacy interface emulating the Windows XP look & feel for users who just won't accept the new system.
- waltherg 12y ago
  That's some solid Bavarian Beamtentum entrenchment on the part of these users.
- 3pt14159 12y ago
  It is 2014, not being able to switch between operating system versions should be looked on as illiteracy. Fine, they can't use Ubuntu, whatever. But if our bureaucrats can't have a basic level of technical literacy, then they shouldn't be trusted with our government's data.
  - dewey 12y ago
    I agree, but you have to keep in mind that some of these users are old (Think about the so police stations in small villages or how we call them: "Dorfpolizisten") and they didn't grow up with computers. It still takes a lot of convincing there especially if there's some kind of "Früher war alles besser" ("Back in the old days everything was better") mentality which isn't uncommon in these parts.
dan_bk 12y ago
A similar project, Wienux, aimed to move the city of Vienna in Austria over to Linux, but hit stumbling blocks in 2008. Peter’s reasoning for this: Wienux didn’t have the proper political backing required. You need more than just a couple of technically minded councillors to make such a big project a success – you need to know that you have the support of the majority. I'm definitely not surprised - Austria is a notoriously conservative and very bureaucratic country, which is deeply reflected by the political landscape. Pioneers and out-of-the-box thinkers don't flourish in this country (although migrating to Linux nowadays is not even pioneering anything anymore).
- restless 12y ago
  "Austria is a notoriously conservative and very bureaucratic country, which is deeply reflected by the political landscape" I am from Bavaria and this sentence exactly describes the politics there. Overall there is not much diffrence between Austria and Bavaria even the dialect is pretty much the same. No insults intended I live in Bavaria and work in Austria.
  - levosmetalo 12y ago
    Even more conservative than Baden-Württemberg?
    - restless 12y ago
      Baden Württemberg is governd by the green party, so basically I would say yes
- DyslexicAtheist 12y ago
  as Austrian, I can only agree
- schrototo 12y ago
  > Austria is a notoriously conservative and very bureaucratic country I would generally agree with this, but just for the record: the city of Vienna has been governed by the center-left Social Democratic Party since 1946. And for the last four years they have been in a coalition with the Green Party.
danso 12y ago
This was a surprisingly interesting and fun read. Contrary to what my assumption is, the switch to Linux was not chosen for being cheaper, as they projected the cost of migration to be more expensive than upgrading the Microsoft machines from NT/2000 to XP. The fact that a "conservative" city council went with Linux based on the strategic long-term is pretty impressive...Assuming that they aren't all tech engineers, it would be natural to stick with a computing platform that you yourself have been using your whole life, rather than impose an entirely new (and more expensive) one on your constituents. Also, at least in the American market, the money poured into sales people to wine-and-dine for government contracts provides even more compelling reasons for politicians and bureaucrats to not rock the boat. And in Munich's case, Steve Ballmer himself flew out, in person, to try to convince them not to quit Windows (and, in the OP's assessment, that apparently was an unwise tactic for Microsoft). OT: The body font of this article, Roboto (http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto), stuck out to me as being both legible and distinctly different than Helvetica...I was reading the article on a tablet but went to my desktop just to see what it was...I think I've seen Roboto before on Google Fonts but not used as body text...I kind of like it, more than some of the common Helvetica replacements (Open/Ubuntu/PT Sans)...even before I started reading the article, I thought, "this is a really nice sans-serif font" edit: Apparently typography aficionados do not like Roboto, calling it a "frightening cross-breed creature" and a "hodgepodge brute" http://typographica.org/on-typography/roboto-typeface-is-a-four-headed-frankenstein/ http://typographica.org/on-typography/roboto-typeface-is-a-f...
- _deh 12y ago
  Excellent - I don't know what yet, but something around here is in for a "hodgepodge brute" designation this afternoon.
- orkoden 12y ago
  It was a huge opportunity to give lots of money to the local software industry.
  - xiaq 12y ago
    IMO the seemingly minor detail that there are local software companies providing support for Linux desktops is actually the key to their success...
orkoden 12y ago
So the result after more than 10 years is: - not all desktops can be transitionend to Linux because of the required Windows only software. - some of the Linux desktops run Wine to support Windows applications. Which is a huge hacky configuration nightmare. The project has seen huge delays and missed deadlines over its duration. See http://web.archive.org/web/20120214072347/http://limuxwatch.blogspot.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20120214072347/http://limuxwatch.... to get an idea of how long it took them to get anywhere and how often the goalposts were moved. Many other city administrations canceled plans of switching to Linux because Munich had such a hard time making it happen.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  >some of the Linux desktops run Wine to support Windows applications. Which is a huge hacky configuration nightmare. Wasn't that a total of two? From the article, it seems that they generally just used a Windows computer when they needed a Windows computer.
- biehl 12y ago
  Wine is pretty good, and supports a surprising amount of windows applications. I am not sure why you call it a configuration nightmare. Have you tried Wine lately?
  - kiallmacinnes 12y ago
    I have, it wasn't pretty... For simple apps, It seems to do well.. For anything complex, it's painful.
  - orkoden 12y ago
    RTFA > “We have a very limited Wine installation, because there’s always the need to save the configuration of Wine together with the application. They’re deeply dependent. If you change the version of Wine, you have to do something with the application, and vice-versa. We saw that we’d have to use 10 or 15 different configurations of Wine on the same machine in some cases
    - 12y ago
lispm 12y ago
I would have been great, if more cities here in Germany followed and supported Munich...
- orkoden 12y ago
  Munich took a decade to do a partial transition with doubtful benefits. Getting that kind of commitment in time and money is not an easy feat.
  - lispm 12y ago
    Niedersachsen had just bought more support for Windows XP. I'd like seeing all this money going into local software development and open standards.
- orkoden 12y ago
  Freiburg tried and gave up http://www.golem.de/news/open-source-freiburg-kehrt-zu-ms-office-zurueck-1211-95843.html http://www.golem.de/news/open-source-freiburg-kehrt-zu-ms-of... The federal foreign ministry also canceled the transition http://www.golem.de/1102/81498.html http://www.golem.de/1102/81498.html
josefresco 12y ago
So what I gather from reading the article, they switched to Linux because of "security" as MS wouldn't tell them what software was "calling home" and to foster the local IT economy as opposed to sending money overseas. I may be alone in this, but those don't seem like compelling, or even believable justifications for switching an entire region to Linux. Are we to believe that MS flew Balmer all the way there to try to convince them to stay, but wouldn't disclose to them what aspects of Windows called home? Also, where is the data that shows how the switch to Linux has helped the local IT economy? Love Linux as much as the next guy, but it seems many of these decisions are driven by staff IT geeks who have it out for MS irregardless of the actual issues at hand.
- brudgers 12y ago
  You're not alone. Munich doesn't represent some unique enlightenment on the part of local government. It is just an ordinary political decision where the calculus was informed by conditions which just happened to be statistical outliers and thus the result is also a statistical outlier. About the time this decision was rolling out, I worked in Municipal government. They had standardized on WordPerfect Office Suite. As part of my job, I attended a few council workshops and can unequivocally assert that these were neither visionaries nor geniuses. Just people making decisions that balanced their personal aspirations and the public good while answering their constiuancy. This story gets rolled out every few months and draws the expected upvotes. One day I hope to read an inside technical account rather than 'Linux has Risen, Risen Indeed.' Today alas is not that day.
  - josefresco 12y ago
    "One day I hope to read an inside technical account" Me too! Most of these feel-good Linux switch stories either fail to look at the long term picture (I switched to Linux last week and so far no problems!) or fail to address the specific reasons why Linux was chosen, or is superior to the MS products. When I read that in this case they weren't saving any money, I was intrigued and eager to read about the real reason. Yet, after reading the entire account I still don't feel like there is/was any compelling data to back up or justify the decision.
Paul_S 12y ago
Can you ever imagine a government enforcing a country-wide switch? I think it would make sense from a purely strategic point of view (even if not just financial) but I can't help but cynically suspect the lobbyists would not stop at anything to prevent it. I've no idea why MS dropped the ball with China.
- elinchrome 12y ago
  MS lobbyists probably don't hold as much sway in China.
  - CmonDev 12y ago
    Maybe they have an anti-bribery policy, so it makes more sense to spend money on Linux consultants and get kick-backs.
  - JabavuAdams 12y ago
    And China has the source to Windows, so...
- clarry 12y ago
  I think that would be terrible and unfair. Plus, I think any switches should be done on a case by case basis. Not all government jobs require the same software.
pbhjpbhj 12y ago
This stood out, a quote within the article: >“In 2008 we saw that Debian was clearly stable, a good thing, but not the best if you want to use new hardware. They are always a few years behind. // Surely they could get a manufacturer to spec them out a new machine that would run on Debian based on an offer to buy ~10k of them and with the potential - should it go well - of selling similar numbers to other major cities.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Probably not? 10k units is peanuts for building a model of computer. And by the time it got made, its already old and costly.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    But it's not like Linux needs completely different architecture or anything, you just need to test the drivers that are already in place, no? Didn't Dell and IBM both do lines that came optionally pre-installed with different distros. Can you really not make enough profit off selling 10k computers (about $20M USD revenue for business machines at EU rates; remember we're back in 2005 here) to cover wages for updating your drivers? It's all very chicken and egg, I understand. I guess the TL;DR question is - is it really not economic for a single mainstream computer seller/manufacturer to sell business spec linux boxes.
pbhjpbhj 12y ago
Initially such a project should cost more, surely. It's a long term saving and the fact that, once established, the software being used can be freely replicated across other cities - they all need the same tools in most situations I'd expect. How many projects has Limux fronted and donated to the FOSS community that can now be used in other cities - venue booking tools, or street maintenance apps, or payroll systems, or CRM, or ... How many local developers are currently working in their LiMux eco-system?
vfclists 12y ago
What do they use for printing, and scanning, printing being the most important? I'd really love to know that
- hippich 12y ago
  there is plenty of hardware which "just work" with existing drivers for linux. with large organization like that they can find right configuration which will just work. this is how apple does it too - they spec their hardware to perfectly match their software. same can be done with that kind of transiton.
  - vfclists 12y ago
    Do you know of any home or small business printers that work with Linux out of the box?
    - hvperborea 12y ago
      http://linuxdeal.com/Printer-Pixma-MP280 http://linuxdeal.com/Printer-Pixma-MP280
    - jebblue 12y ago
      There is a large company who is known for their printers. Search Google for them, odds are they make whole lines that will work just fine with any Linux made in the past 7 or 8 years. No driver disk needed probably. Printing, scanning and fax would not surprise me.
    - omegaham 12y ago
      Immediately of the box? No. A single driver installation? Yes, for both HP and Brother. Canon's stuff is a little weirder, but it's not terrible.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
    - 12y ago
cs702 12y ago
Wow... it's taken the Munich government a decade (2003-2013) to switch desktops to Linux and Free software, and they're still working on it. (There are still a small number of desktops running proprietary applications on Wine.) It just shows how difficult it can be for a large organization to wean itself off proprietary software lock-in. The good news is that future similar migrations will be much easier and faster, now that Munich has shown the way for others to follow. It's good news because increased competition in the desktop OS market can lead only to better, more innovative products for everyone.
- perlgeek 12y ago
  The second good news is that, in the case of Munich, the migration is financially self-sustaining. That's because the saved license costs exceed the costs of the project. This is mostly because a large number of fairly standard desktops could be migrated early on.
  - brudgers 12y ago
    What evidence do you have that the switch is financially self-sustaining based upon license fee savings? I'm not saying this isn't true, but I've never seen a reputable ROI analysis for Munich's switch. [caveat: my German is very very weak.]
    - perlgeek 12y ago
      I was in a hearing of a committee ("Enquete-Kommission Internet und digitale Gesellschaft") of the German Parliament (Bundestag) where the technical leader of the LiMux project mentioned the numbers in passing. IIRC he mentioned that if you only consider the license costs, the balance is roughly even, and if you also consider that you need to upgrade the hardware less often (because of lower resource usage of limux vs. windows), limux comes out clearly ahead. Sorry that I don't have anything to link to, and I notice that my source is biased too.
      - brudgers 12y ago
lawl 12y ago
Now that they saved 10M Euros by using open source, can they donate 5 of them to vital open source projects please? cough OpenSSL cough
- josefresco 12y ago
  Only problem is the 10M they "saved" was based on the assumption that if they had chosen Windows, they would have had to keep upgrading/paying for new versions. This assertion is dubious at best. I would imagine most computers/departments would not have been required to buy each and every new Windows/Office release. A great counter argument to mine (not that any of you need help) would be to point out a specific Linux feature needed in the last decade that was "free" whereas a comparable Windows/Office feature would have forced an upgrade.
  - makomk 12y ago
    They would have to upgrade to new versions every so often, because older versions of Windows and Office stop being supported and stop getting security updates after a while.
    - byte1918 12y ago
      > after a while. Yeah like... 12 years or so.
gbog 12y ago
That's great! I think all the people changing their minds on Microsoft (cool again) and Bill gates (good guy) should put this elephant in the balance: almost all companies and institutions depend on ONE software provider for their most vital work, and this provider is private for-money company subject to all the misbehaviors without any control. For me Microsoft is still the worst that happened to our industry (Facebook and Google are angels in comparison) and it should stay as a big red dot in the center of our radars.
nnq 12y ago
Please, the big problem of governments and administrations is not using Linux or Windows, the operating system is irrelevant... The problem was probably reliance on crappy software written by shitty companies that only try to milk them of more and more money. The fact that it took them a decade to make the transition was most likely because of the shitty non-standard software they were using and the time it takes to retrain people used to working with backwards and user hostile software. If you are a gov accountant or clerk and you accounting software had such a bad ui that it took you 3+ years to properly learn to use it, of course you will resist any kind of change because you just can't imagine things can be any better. And this is because governments and administration never choose any kind of product because it is "easy to use", "simple to maintain" or "easy to extend". Even the switch to Linux was made for the wrong reasons, that is for trying to find something cheaper and better ("better" seems to mean "more secure" in this case). NEWSFLASH: As a government/administration, you should never look for cheaper and/or better things, you should look for something that is "barely good enough" (even when it's a bit worse than what you already have), but easiest to use without training, easiest to teach people how to use it, easiest to replace / throw away and cheapest to extend, even if it happens to be both worse an more expensive. The fact that they happened to choose Linux, which is probably a pretty good fit for them, was an accident, as they did the same old stupid thing of going to look for something cheaper and better.
- orkoden 12y ago
  >And this is because governments and administration never choose any kind of product because it is "easy to use", "simple to maintain" or "easy to extend". The same is true for enterprise software. It's not optimized for the users. It's optimized to appeal to ones paying.
- emsy 12y ago
  Afaik, in the EU it's even regulated that the lowest contester wins the bid. (Or it was, until January 2014)
  - claudius 12y ago
    Of course the lowest bidder is supposed to win, as all bids are supposed to fulfil the requirements laid out in the contest and these requirements are assumed to be fully sufficient for the task at hand. Theoretically speaking, of course.
hippich 12y ago
I guess it is coincidence, but I spent explaining my point of view why open source should be a base platform for any public organization funding with tax money to a few of my friends last week, where each was complaining about office suite/mail/desktop/etc differences from windows-based analogs. My major practical benefit from switch to open source by as large organization as city government is the fact that these money will go to local support organizations and results of their work will be owned by whole city. I.e. if taxpayers paid for this software patches, updates, etc it make sense to own this work at very least.
- jenscow 12y ago
  I completely agree. And why should my taxes go to a foreign company, who are trying their best to dodge paying taxes in my country. I'd rather it was spend on employing local people. Not only that, how can a government feel confident in depending so much on a single overseas entity? This isn't even a technical issue.
wil421 12y ago
Its amazing they actually made the switch. I would not want to working at the helpdesk if my company switched to Linux! Too bad I hate open office because that is my last dependency on Microsoft. I'll still take OS X for my daily computer over Linux any day.
- mcb3k 12y ago
  Have you taken a look at LibreOffice[1]? It forked from OpenOffice a few years, and my understanding is that it is much more actively developed than OpenOffice. [1]: http://www.libreoffice.org/ http://www.libreoffice.org/
- keithpeter 12y ago
  "I hate open office" Is this hate based on criteria that you can articulate or just a (no doubt strong) feeling? LO serves my needs well, and the mathematical formula editor is less annoying than the one in MS Office 2010.
guidopallemans 12y ago
> A new version of the LiMux Client is due this year; it will be based on Kubuntu 12.04, an LTS (Long-Term Support) release. > May 9th, 2014 They are an entire LTS release behind?
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  An "entire LTS"? It was only released 2 years ago, and 14.04 just came out. And it's not like they could use 13.10 or whatever. They need to use LTS.
- orkoden 12y ago
  They are an entire LTS release behind for the new version coming later this year. 12.04 still has 3 years of support though.
gall 12y ago
What astounds me is that this project is called LiMux and not Munix.
davidf18 12y ago
What they have managed to do is to make life more difficult for their employees. Most of those employees have a computer at home that runs Windows and uses Word, Excel, Powerpoint, .... Now they have to learn a second operating system and set of applications software. Assuming a five year life for a computer (in government that is) or about 2000 days of use, then the cost of licensing on a daily basis is going to be pennies a day for all of this hardship. Crazy!
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  >Now they have to learn a second operating system and set of applications software. // Well updating to ribbon based UI is as hard, probably more so, than switching to LibreOffice. Also, they can install Limux at home for free and so use a consistent system across work and home. That way they can save money on future upgrades at home too.
- Zigurd 12y ago
  > Most of those employees have a computer at home that runs Windows and uses Word, Excel, Powerpoint..." 2004 called. Today, most people use a smartphone most frequently.
- danford 12y ago
  Using Linux isn't that hard. I worked for a call center that trained people on command line DOS in 3 days. Not to mention there are a lot of companies dishing out business phones running OS's that are completely different from windows, but we never hear about how hard it is for the employees to use the company phone.
Zigurd 12y ago
When people say "Linux" they mean a desktop-metaphor UI, a userland that accommodates multiple runtime environments, and a set of apps modeled after what was available on Windows 15 years ago. There is a place for this, like on my desk, because I need a big fast machine and a large monitor and, in my case, I use Eclipse and the Android SDK, but it could be Blender or LMMS or science applications. For the other 99%, there are two instances where Linux is a hit. But making Linux a hit required jettisoning the desktop metaphor and making a modern managed userland with a single runtime environment. Of course I mean Android and ChromeOS. The future of open software distributions is going to look more like CyanogenMod and less like Ubuntu.
someone4223 12y ago
limux developer here: the migration is complete in 2012. BUT the development and maintenance of a new distribution version for the city is never complete. or are you going to use the same ubuntu version forever? and no one in the city of munich is really thinking about going back to windows. but there are some people who just like windows more and try to shift that political stance back. but that won't happen.. too expensive.
- orkoden 12y ago
  Why is your upcoming version then based the last LTS version, not the current one.
oakwhiz 12y ago
One person came with a floppy disk and said ‘My most important documents are on this. Is it still possible to work with them?’ A better question might be "Why are you storing important documents on a medium with such a high failure rate?"
stannol 12y ago
Interesting article, but saying Munich is conservative is just plain wrong. Munich is to Bavaria what Austin is to Texas, it's as liberal as it gets.
ericcumbee 12y ago
The article glosses over key metrics for IT support # of helpdesk tickets, man hours per asset. an IDC survey showed that WinXP took on average around 4 man hours a year of support per asset, where win7 took just over 1.5. I'd be interested in seeing those numbers. I dont know what the state of admin tools for large linux desktop deployments is, but having seen the power of SCCM and ActiveDirectory even with WinXP. That leads me to belive that they are not as powerful so say if Win7 was at 1.5 Linux would be at maybe 2.5? That difference alone at a large scale, would eat into the cost savings of the deployment right there.
darksim905 12y ago
Yay! Maybe it's finally the year of the Linux Desktop! Give me a break. For how scalable Linux is & how fast you can automate installations, move data around, script work to be done, it took them 10 years to do this? (Judging by the comments) It would take a typical Linux Sysadmin 3 years tops, depending on if they have everything they need, planning & getting people trained. This is a joke.

382 points by mksaunders 12y ago

The whole story is enjoyable; especially the Ballmer Visit part. It's surprising to see the city council reacting that way to his visit. Something that is hard to understand in many parts of the world.

Vespasian 12y ago
Maybe Ballmer was overkill in this situation. While I could see a local (German or even Bavarian since their German Headquarter is just out of Munich) manager with connections to members of the council being able to influence their decision, an American coming over and basically demanding from them to change their mind is probably the best way to enforce the idea even more. The article mentions that the mayor had difficulties communicating in English good enough to feel comfortable. Add to that the slight dislike of American culture common with many people here, the high degree of local identification in southern germany and you get that result. That said, there CEO flying over was probably the last straw they reverted to when everything else had failed ;)

sdfjkl 12y ago

The most surprising thing about all this is that a city council needed 15'000 PCs in the first place, implying a roughly equal number of users.

sgift 12y ago
15.000 for the administration of Munich, a city with nearly 1.4 million inhabitants. I don't see anything surprising here?
- sdfjkl 12y ago
  1 employee per 93 citizens? I don't have anything to compare it to, but it seems high.
  - oblio 12y ago
    "From June 30, 2002 through June 30, 2013, city staffing decreased by 9,028 positions and totaled 295,894 by the end of fiscal year 2013, a 3.0 percent decline." http://ibo.nyc.ny.us/cgi-park2/?p=590 http://ibo.nyc.ny.us/cgi-park2/?p=590 Apparently you need a lot of people to keep a city running.
    - xyzzy123 12y ago
      This includes firefighters, police, education, and probably things like sanitation. I wonder if the Munich figures include these staff.
      - arrrg 12y ago
        For the most part, yes. Here’s a list (German): http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtverwaltung_München http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtverwaltung_München Police are employed by the state (Bavaria in Munich) in Germany, but the rest should be included. Teachers and all kinds of other child care workers definitely are. If it isn’t done by the church child care is usually organised by the city. Public schools are the norm (only about six percent of students in Germany go to private schools). Munich has 4500 full time teachers for 72000 students. Municipal utilities, public transport and the hospital were all privatised in the 90s, so those aren’t included (about 20,000 employees). Really, to compare the numbers you have to go through them item by item. However, Munich’s number doesn’t seem high compared to US numbers for local government.
  - mrweasel 12y ago
    Not if you're European. I don't have the numbers for Germany, but here in Denmark somewhere between 30 to 40% of the workforce are employed by the government ( city/country/state ).
  - kiiski 12y ago
    I live in a small city of 75000 people (in Finland), where the city has ~4400 employees.
  - pistle 12y ago
- xyzzy123 12y ago
  93 * 0.66 * 0.75 = 1 in 45 workers work for the city council (and need a desktop!). That does seem like a lot to me, I wonder if the council administers some larger area than just the city? Based on an age-dependency ratio of 50 for Germany[1] as a whole and employment to population ratio[2] of 75%. [1] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/age-dependency-ratio-percent-of-working-age-population-wb-data.html http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/age-dependency-ratio... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment-to-population_ratio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment-to-population_ratio EDIT: Fixed math with age/dependency ratio...

dewey 12y ago

Interesting, just yesterday I visited the "Landeskriminalamt" (State Office of Criminal Investigations) in Munich and they are just migrating all of their Windows XP desktops (They were criticized after paying a lot of money to keep getting security updates from Microsoft) to Windows 8.1. They mentioned that they are paying a lot of licence fees every year and that making sure everything is licenced correctly is a big task in itself. We asked them why they are not switching to open source software and Linux for their desktops and they basically said it's too big of a switch and even the city of Munich is struggling to migrate all their computers and that they are even thinking about switching back to Windows. This doesn't really seem that accurate after reading that article. Edit: Another anecdote from the visit: They said that even the switch from XP to 8.1 will confuse a lot of users (The guy giving the talk said that their average employee is already confused if some icons on the desktop change and they are very reluctant to accept changes). They printed flyers and recorded elearning courses on how to open a program or use the new system. They also added a simple way to migrate to some kind of legacy interface emulating the Windows XP look & feel for users who just won't accept the new system.

waltherg 12y ago
That's some solid Bavarian Beamtentum entrenchment on the part of these users.
3pt14159 12y ago
It is 2014, not being able to switch between operating system versions should be looked on as illiteracy. Fine, they can't use Ubuntu, whatever. But if our bureaucrats can't have a basic level of technical literacy, then they shouldn't be trusted with our government's data.
- dewey 12y ago
  I agree, but you have to keep in mind that some of these users are old (Think about the so police stations in small villages or how we call them: "Dorfpolizisten") and they didn't grow up with computers. It still takes a lot of convincing there especially if there's some kind of "Früher war alles besser" ("Back in the old days everything was better") mentality which isn't uncommon in these parts.

dan_bk 12y ago

A similar project, Wienux, aimed to move the city of Vienna in Austria over to Linux, but hit stumbling blocks in 2008. Peter’s reasoning for this: Wienux didn’t have the proper political backing required. You need more than just a couple of technically minded councillors to make such a big project a success – you need to know that you have the support of the majority. I'm definitely not surprised - Austria is a notoriously conservative and very bureaucratic country, which is deeply reflected by the political landscape. Pioneers and out-of-the-box thinkers don't flourish in this country (although migrating to Linux nowadays is not even pioneering anything anymore).

restless 12y ago
"Austria is a notoriously conservative and very bureaucratic country, which is deeply reflected by the political landscape" I am from Bavaria and this sentence exactly describes the politics there. Overall there is not much diffrence between Austria and Bavaria even the dialect is pretty much the same. No insults intended I live in Bavaria and work in Austria.
- levosmetalo 12y ago
  Even more conservative than Baden-Württemberg?
  - restless 12y ago
    Baden Württemberg is governd by the green party, so basically I would say yes
DyslexicAtheist 12y ago
as Austrian, I can only agree
schrototo 12y ago
> Austria is a notoriously conservative and very bureaucratic country I would generally agree with this, but just for the record: the city of Vienna has been governed by the center-left Social Democratic Party since 1946. And for the last four years they have been in a coalition with the Green Party.

danso 12y ago

This was a surprisingly interesting and fun read. Contrary to what my assumption is, the switch to Linux was not chosen for being cheaper, as they projected the cost of migration to be more expensive than upgrading the Microsoft machines from NT/2000 to XP. The fact that a "conservative" city council went with Linux based on the strategic long-term is pretty impressive...Assuming that they aren't all tech engineers, it would be natural to stick with a computing platform that you yourself have been using your whole life, rather than impose an entirely new (and more expensive) one on your constituents. Also, at least in the American market, the money poured into sales people to wine-and-dine for government contracts provides even more compelling reasons for politicians and bureaucrats to not rock the boat. And in Munich's case, Steve Ballmer himself flew out, in person, to try to convince them not to quit Windows (and, in the OP's assessment, that apparently was an unwise tactic for Microsoft). OT: The body font of this article, Roboto (http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto), stuck out to me as being both legible and distinctly different than Helvetica...I was reading the article on a tablet but went to my desktop just to see what it was...I think I've seen Roboto before on Google Fonts but not used as body text...I kind of like it, more than some of the common Helvetica replacements (Open/Ubuntu/PT Sans)...even before I started reading the article, I thought, "this is a really nice sans-serif font" edit: Apparently typography aficionados do not like Roboto, calling it a "frightening cross-breed creature" and a "hodgepodge brute" http://typographica.org/on-typography/roboto-typeface-is-a-four-headed-frankenstein/ http://typographica.org/on-typography/roboto-typeface-is-a-f...

_deh 12y ago
Excellent - I don't know what yet, but something around here is in for a "hodgepodge brute" designation this afternoon.
orkoden 12y ago
It was a huge opportunity to give lots of money to the local software industry.
- xiaq 12y ago
  IMO the seemingly minor detail that there are local software companies providing support for Linux desktops is actually the key to their success...

orkoden 12y ago

So the result after more than 10 years is: - not all desktops can be transitionend to Linux because of the required Windows only software. - some of the Linux desktops run Wine to support Windows applications. Which is a huge hacky configuration nightmare. The project has seen huge delays and missed deadlines over its duration. See http://web.archive.org/web/20120214072347/http://limuxwatch.blogspot.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20120214072347/http://limuxwatch.... to get an idea of how long it took them to get anywhere and how often the goalposts were moved. Many other city administrations canceled plans of switching to Linux because Munich had such a hard time making it happen.

pessimizer 12y ago
>some of the Linux desktops run Wine to support Windows applications. Which is a huge hacky configuration nightmare. Wasn't that a total of two? From the article, it seems that they generally just used a Windows computer when they needed a Windows computer.
biehl 12y ago
Wine is pretty good, and supports a surprising amount of windows applications. I am not sure why you call it a configuration nightmare. Have you tried Wine lately?
- kiallmacinnes 12y ago
  I have, it wasn't pretty... For simple apps, It seems to do well.. For anything complex, it's painful.
- orkoden 12y ago
  RTFA > “We have a very limited Wine installation, because there’s always the need to save the configuration of Wine together with the application. They’re deeply dependent. If you change the version of Wine, you have to do something with the application, and vice-versa. We saw that we’d have to use 10 or 15 different configurations of Wine on the same machine in some cases
  - 12y ago

lispm 12y ago

I would have been great, if more cities here in Germany followed and supported Munich...

orkoden 12y ago
Munich took a decade to do a partial transition with doubtful benefits. Getting that kind of commitment in time and money is not an easy feat.
- lispm 12y ago
  Niedersachsen had just bought more support for Windows XP. I'd like seeing all this money going into local software development and open standards.
orkoden 12y ago
Freiburg tried and gave up http://www.golem.de/news/open-source-freiburg-kehrt-zu-ms-office-zurueck-1211-95843.html http://www.golem.de/news/open-source-freiburg-kehrt-zu-ms-of... The federal foreign ministry also canceled the transition http://www.golem.de/1102/81498.html http://www.golem.de/1102/81498.html

josefresco 12y ago

So what I gather from reading the article, they switched to Linux because of "security" as MS wouldn't tell them what software was "calling home" and to foster the local IT economy as opposed to sending money overseas. I may be alone in this, but those don't seem like compelling, or even believable justifications for switching an entire region to Linux. Are we to believe that MS flew Balmer all the way there to try to convince them to stay, but wouldn't disclose to them what aspects of Windows called home? Also, where is the data that shows how the switch to Linux has helped the local IT economy? Love Linux as much as the next guy, but it seems many of these decisions are driven by staff IT geeks who have it out for MS irregardless of the actual issues at hand.

brudgers 12y ago
You're not alone. Munich doesn't represent some unique enlightenment on the part of local government. It is just an ordinary political decision where the calculus was informed by conditions which just happened to be statistical outliers and thus the result is also a statistical outlier. About the time this decision was rolling out, I worked in Municipal government. They had standardized on WordPerfect Office Suite. As part of my job, I attended a few council workshops and can unequivocally assert that these were neither visionaries nor geniuses. Just people making decisions that balanced their personal aspirations and the public good while answering their constiuancy. This story gets rolled out every few months and draws the expected upvotes. One day I hope to read an inside technical account rather than 'Linux has Risen, Risen Indeed.' Today alas is not that day.
- josefresco 12y ago
  "One day I hope to read an inside technical account" Me too! Most of these feel-good Linux switch stories either fail to look at the long term picture (I switched to Linux last week and so far no problems!) or fail to address the specific reasons why Linux was chosen, or is superior to the MS products. When I read that in this case they weren't saving any money, I was intrigued and eager to read about the real reason. Yet, after reading the entire account I still don't feel like there is/was any compelling data to back up or justify the decision.

Paul_S 12y ago

Can you ever imagine a government enforcing a country-wide switch? I think it would make sense from a purely strategic point of view (even if not just financial) but I can't help but cynically suspect the lobbyists would not stop at anything to prevent it. I've no idea why MS dropped the ball with China.

elinchrome 12y ago
MS lobbyists probably don't hold as much sway in China.
- CmonDev 12y ago
  Maybe they have an anti-bribery policy, so it makes more sense to spend money on Linux consultants and get kick-backs.
- JabavuAdams 12y ago
  And China has the source to Windows, so...
clarry 12y ago
I think that would be terrible and unfair. Plus, I think any switches should be done on a case by case basis. Not all government jobs require the same software.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago

This stood out, a quote within the article: >“In 2008 we saw that Debian was clearly stable, a good thing, but not the best if you want to use new hardware. They are always a few years behind. // Surely they could get a manufacturer to spec them out a new machine that would run on Debian based on an offer to buy ~10k of them and with the potential - should it go well - of selling similar numbers to other major cities.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Probably not? 10k units is peanuts for building a model of computer. And by the time it got made, its already old and costly.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  But it's not like Linux needs completely different architecture or anything, you just need to test the drivers that are already in place, no? Didn't Dell and IBM both do lines that came optionally pre-installed with different distros. Can you really not make enough profit off selling 10k computers (about $20M USD revenue for business machines at EU rates; remember we're back in 2005 here) to cover wages for updating your drivers? It's all very chicken and egg, I understand. I guess the TL;DR question is - is it really not economic for a single mainstream computer seller/manufacturer to sell business spec linux boxes.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago

Initially such a project should cost more, surely. It's a long term saving and the fact that, once established, the software being used can be freely replicated across other cities - they all need the same tools in most situations I'd expect. How many projects has Limux fronted and donated to the FOSS community that can now be used in other cities - venue booking tools, or street maintenance apps, or payroll systems, or CRM, or ... How many local developers are currently working in their LiMux eco-system?

vfclists 12y ago

What do they use for printing, and scanning, printing being the most important? I'd really love to know that

hippich 12y ago
there is plenty of hardware which "just work" with existing drivers for linux. with large organization like that they can find right configuration which will just work. this is how apple does it too - they spec their hardware to perfectly match their software. same can be done with that kind of transiton.
- vfclists 12y ago
  Do you know of any home or small business printers that work with Linux out of the box?
  - hvperborea 12y ago
    http://linuxdeal.com/Printer-Pixma-MP280 http://linuxdeal.com/Printer-Pixma-MP280
  - jebblue 12y ago
    There is a large company who is known for their printers. Search Google for them, odds are they make whole lines that will work just fine with any Linux made in the past 7 or 8 years. No driver disk needed probably. Printing, scanning and fax would not surprise me.
  - omegaham 12y ago
    Immediately of the box? No. A single driver installation? Yes, for both HP and Brother. Canon's stuff is a little weirder, but it's not terrible.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - 12y ago

cs702 12y ago

Wow... it's taken the Munich government a decade (2003-2013) to switch desktops to Linux and Free software, and they're still working on it. (There are still a small number of desktops running proprietary applications on Wine.) It just shows how difficult it can be for a large organization to wean itself off proprietary software lock-in. The good news is that future similar migrations will be much easier and faster, now that Munich has shown the way for others to follow. It's good news because increased competition in the desktop OS market can lead only to better, more innovative products for everyone.

perlgeek 12y ago
The second good news is that, in the case of Munich, the migration is financially self-sustaining. That's because the saved license costs exceed the costs of the project. This is mostly because a large number of fairly standard desktops could be migrated early on.
- brudgers 12y ago
  What evidence do you have that the switch is financially self-sustaining based upon license fee savings? I'm not saying this isn't true, but I've never seen a reputable ROI analysis for Munich's switch. [caveat: my German is very very weak.]
  - perlgeek 12y ago
    I was in a hearing of a committee ("Enquete-Kommission Internet und digitale Gesellschaft") of the German Parliament (Bundestag) where the technical leader of the LiMux project mentioned the numbers in passing. IIRC he mentioned that if you only consider the license costs, the balance is roughly even, and if you also consider that you need to upgrade the hardware less often (because of lower resource usage of limux vs. windows), limux comes out clearly ahead. Sorry that I don't have anything to link to, and I notice that my source is biased too.
    - brudgers 12y ago

lawl 12y ago

Now that they saved 10M Euros by using open source, can they donate 5 of them to vital open source projects please? cough OpenSSL cough

josefresco 12y ago
Only problem is the 10M they "saved" was based on the assumption that if they had chosen Windows, they would have had to keep upgrading/paying for new versions. This assertion is dubious at best. I would imagine most computers/departments would not have been required to buy each and every new Windows/Office release. A great counter argument to mine (not that any of you need help) would be to point out a specific Linux feature needed in the last decade that was "free" whereas a comparable Windows/Office feature would have forced an upgrade.
- makomk 12y ago
  They would have to upgrade to new versions every so often, because older versions of Windows and Office stop being supported and stop getting security updates after a while.
  - byte1918 12y ago
    > after a while. Yeah like... 12 years or so.

gbog 12y ago

That's great! I think all the people changing their minds on Microsoft (cool again) and Bill gates (good guy) should put this elephant in the balance: almost all companies and institutions depend on ONE software provider for their most vital work, and this provider is private for-money company subject to all the misbehaviors without any control. For me Microsoft is still the worst that happened to our industry (Facebook and Google are angels in comparison) and it should stay as a big red dot in the center of our radars.

nnq 12y ago

Please, the big problem of governments and administrations is not using Linux or Windows, the operating system is irrelevant... The problem was probably reliance on crappy software written by shitty companies that only try to milk them of more and more money. The fact that it took them a decade to make the transition was most likely because of the shitty non-standard software they were using and the time it takes to retrain people used to working with backwards and user hostile software. If you are a gov accountant or clerk and you accounting software had such a bad ui that it took you 3+ years to properly learn to use it, of course you will resist any kind of change because you just can't imagine things can be any better. And this is because governments and administration never choose any kind of product because it is "easy to use", "simple to maintain" or "easy to extend". Even the switch to Linux was made for the wrong reasons, that is for trying to find something cheaper and better ("better" seems to mean "more secure" in this case). NEWSFLASH: As a government/administration, you should never look for cheaper and/or better things, you should look for something that is "barely good enough" (even when it's a bit worse than what you already have), but easiest to use without training, easiest to teach people how to use it, easiest to replace / throw away and cheapest to extend, even if it happens to be both worse an more expensive. The fact that they happened to choose Linux, which is probably a pretty good fit for them, was an accident, as they did the same old stupid thing of going to look for something cheaper and better.

orkoden 12y ago
>And this is because governments and administration never choose any kind of product because it is "easy to use", "simple to maintain" or "easy to extend". The same is true for enterprise software. It's not optimized for the users. It's optimized to appeal to ones paying.
emsy 12y ago
Afaik, in the EU it's even regulated that the lowest contester wins the bid. (Or it was, until January 2014)
- claudius 12y ago
  Of course the lowest bidder is supposed to win, as all bids are supposed to fulfil the requirements laid out in the contest and these requirements are assumed to be fully sufficient for the task at hand. Theoretically speaking, of course.

hippich 12y ago

I guess it is coincidence, but I spent explaining my point of view why open source should be a base platform for any public organization funding with tax money to a few of my friends last week, where each was complaining about office suite/mail/desktop/etc differences from windows-based analogs. My major practical benefit from switch to open source by as large organization as city government is the fact that these money will go to local support organizations and results of their work will be owned by whole city. I.e. if taxpayers paid for this software patches, updates, etc it make sense to own this work at very least.

jenscow 12y ago
I completely agree. And why should my taxes go to a foreign company, who are trying their best to dodge paying taxes in my country. I'd rather it was spend on employing local people. Not only that, how can a government feel confident in depending so much on a single overseas entity? This isn't even a technical issue.

wil421 12y ago

Its amazing they actually made the switch. I would not want to working at the helpdesk if my company switched to Linux! Too bad I hate open office because that is my last dependency on Microsoft. I'll still take OS X for my daily computer over Linux any day.

mcb3k 12y ago
Have you taken a look at LibreOffice[1]? It forked from OpenOffice a few years, and my understanding is that it is much more actively developed than OpenOffice. [1]: http://www.libreoffice.org/ http://www.libreoffice.org/
keithpeter 12y ago
"I hate open office" Is this hate based on criteria that you can articulate or just a (no doubt strong) feeling? LO serves my needs well, and the mathematical formula editor is less annoying than the one in MS Office 2010.

guidopallemans 12y ago

> A new version of the LiMux Client is due this year; it will be based on Kubuntu 12.04, an LTS (Long-Term Support) release. > May 9th, 2014 They are an entire LTS release behind?

higherpurpose 12y ago
An "entire LTS"? It was only released 2 years ago, and 14.04 just came out. And it's not like they could use 13.10 or whatever. They need to use LTS.
orkoden 12y ago
They are an entire LTS release behind for the new version coming later this year. 12.04 still has 3 years of support though.

gall 12y ago

What astounds me is that this project is called LiMux and not Munix.

davidf18 12y ago

What they have managed to do is to make life more difficult for their employees. Most of those employees have a computer at home that runs Windows and uses Word, Excel, Powerpoint, .... Now they have to learn a second operating system and set of applications software. Assuming a five year life for a computer (in government that is) or about 2000 days of use, then the cost of licensing on a daily basis is going to be pennies a day for all of this hardship. Crazy!

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
>Now they have to learn a second operating system and set of applications software. // Well updating to ribbon based UI is as hard, probably more so, than switching to LibreOffice. Also, they can install Limux at home for free and so use a consistent system across work and home. That way they can save money on future upgrades at home too.
Zigurd 12y ago
> Most of those employees have a computer at home that runs Windows and uses Word, Excel, Powerpoint..." 2004 called. Today, most people use a smartphone most frequently.
danford 12y ago
Using Linux isn't that hard. I worked for a call center that trained people on command line DOS in 3 days. Not to mention there are a lot of companies dishing out business phones running OS's that are completely different from windows, but we never hear about how hard it is for the employees to use the company phone.

Zigurd 12y ago

When people say "Linux" they mean a desktop-metaphor UI, a userland that accommodates multiple runtime environments, and a set of apps modeled after what was available on Windows 15 years ago. There is a place for this, like on my desk, because I need a big fast machine and a large monitor and, in my case, I use Eclipse and the Android SDK, but it could be Blender or LMMS or science applications. For the other 99%, there are two instances where Linux is a hit. But making Linux a hit required jettisoning the desktop metaphor and making a modern managed userland with a single runtime environment. Of course I mean Android and ChromeOS. The future of open software distributions is going to look more like CyanogenMod and less like Ubuntu.

someone4223 12y ago

limux developer here: the migration is complete in 2012. BUT the development and maintenance of a new distribution version for the city is never complete. or are you going to use the same ubuntu version forever? and no one in the city of munich is really thinking about going back to windows. but there are some people who just like windows more and try to shift that political stance back. but that won't happen.. too expensive.

orkoden 12y ago
Why is your upcoming version then based the last LTS version, not the current one.

oakwhiz 12y ago

One person came with a floppy disk and said ‘My most important documents are on this. Is it still possible to work with them?’ A better question might be "Why are you storing important documents on a medium with such a high failure rate?"

stannol 12y ago

Interesting article, but saying Munich is conservative is just plain wrong. Munich is to Bavaria what Austin is to Texas, it's as liberal as it gets.

ericcumbee 12y ago

The article glosses over key metrics for IT support # of helpdesk tickets, man hours per asset. an IDC survey showed that WinXP took on average around 4 man hours a year of support per asset, where win7 took just over 1.5. I'd be interested in seeing those numbers. I dont know what the state of admin tools for large linux desktop deployments is, but having seen the power of SCCM and ActiveDirectory even with WinXP. That leads me to belive that they are not as powerful so say if Win7 was at 1.5 Linux would be at maybe 2.5? That difference alone at a large scale, would eat into the cost savings of the deployment right there.

darksim905 12y ago

Yay! Maybe it's finally the year of the Linux Desktop! Give me a break. For how scalable Linux is & how fast you can automate installations, move data around, script work to be done, it took them 10 years to do this? (Judging by the comments) It would take a typical Linux Sysadmin 3 years tops, depending on if they have everything they need, planning & getting people trained. This is a joke.